I have several things to say about the recent flame war:

1) Theo claims that the situation is analogous to a husband and wife,
who happen to work together, having an argument at home, and one of
them trying to use that to get the other fired.  This is not the case.
In the case of Theo and several other people (though he persists in
claiming that it is only one), the `arguments' (which consisted
primarily of vitriol from Theo) were specifically regarding
interactions about NetBSD, not about who sleeps on which side of the
bed, or whether he should put the toilet seat down afterward.  I
posted a more appropriate analogy a few months ago, and I include that
message below for reference.

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Date: Fri, 26 May 1995 12:55:57 -0400
Message-Id: <199505261655.MAA29845@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu>
From: "Charles M. Hannum" <mycroft@ai.mit.edu>
To: deraadt@theos.com
Cc: port-sparc@netbsd.org
Subject: Re: theo's changes


   Chris (and the core) apparently believe that a person involved in
   NetBSD cannot have personal communications with another NetBSD
   person without those communications impacting the project. i have
   been punished, meanwhile Jonathan Stone now has CVS access.

That's a *serious* misrepresentation of the situation.

Imagine Company A and Company B are in a callaboration.  Person A from
from Company A calls up Person B from Company B and starts spewing
vitriol at him.  Regardless of whether or not one considers it a
`private' phone call, and especially since the only reason they are in
contact at all is the callaboration, it is completely reasonable, if
not expected, for Company A to reprimand Person A.  If reprimanding
doesn't work, then more serious action would be taken.

While it's true that NetBSD is not a real company, this situation is
still very analogous, and I'm quite certain that the seriousness of
your actions required our response.

BTW, in my experience, Jonathan has been a bit too eager to believe
that someone was stepping on him, but he's always been willing to at
least admit his mistakes.  I've had no quarrel with him that was not
resolved satisfactorily within a day.  He was also entirely willing to
distribute his changes even when he didn't have access to the CVS
tree.  But Jonathan is also not the only other person involved.
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2) Darren claims there has been no progress on the SPARC port.  That
is, in fact, false.  To name just the larger changes:

* Paul incorporated a modified version of David Miller's disassembler
for DDB.
* Paul did some noticable work on the SPARC pmap code, mostly directed
toward Sun 4m support.
* Paul incorporated changes from Chuck, Francis Dupont, and Theo to
support the 4/100 series.
* Paul incorporated Theo's changes for `swap generic'.
* Paul ported a floppy driver.
* Christos made Solaris/SVR4 emulation (mostly) work.
* Paul incorporated Rolf Grossman's new audio driver.
* Paul made swapping of upages work.
* Paul incorporated Jason's `eeprom' kernel changes and utility.
* Paul incorporated Chuck's SMD disk driver.
* Paul incorporated Jason's port of the Sun 3 `si' driver.

In addition, Paul has kept the port up to date with the rest of the
system (in addition to doing various other work in the source tree),
and several people have fixed bugs in it.

3) Darren complains that more people should have access to the CVS
tree.  In fact, at least 9 additional people have been given access
recently.

4) I would like to correct a misconception.  While the heyday of
development on the SPARC port was almost certainly while Theo was the
`port master', this is not solely a reflection on Theo's abilities.
The state of the SPARC port at the beginning was fairly bad, and rapid
development is a natural result of that.  Also, even at that time,
there were significant contributions from other people (like the VM
changes that allowed shared libraries to work well, which were written
by Paul, or the new (though still slightly toasted) SCSI driver from
Peter, which allowed tapes to finally work, or the 4/300 support,
which was initially done by Chuck, or the original 4.4 port from Chris
Torek, etc.).  While Theo's contributions are certainly appreciated,
it would be unreasonable to overlook the other contributors.

5) Larry speaks of hate.  I, for one, do not `hate' Theo -- or anyone
else involved in NetBSD.

6) It seems that several people, most notably David, have resorted to
personal attacks.  This hardly leaves a good impression of David, much
less the Linux/SPARC community.

Lastly, if Theo doesn't want to distribute his code, that's his
choice.  But to blame the `core' group for not putting in code that it
doesn't even have is not only unfair, but rather completely illogical.
I am rather distressed that people seem to be encouraging the `core'
group to submit to what is essentially a form of blackmail.